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Comment by lostlogin | Hacker News Reader

It’s a bit of a sledgehammer approach, but a Nuc with Proxmox is pretty excellent. You can even use 10gbe via thunderbolt (or the pci slot on the larger Nucs).

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This is the way. An x86 NUC/Mini PC/Thin client smokes the ARM SBC market.

Are there any boxes without a graphics card or at least with a primitive one? So that they would be more economical in case you only need them for the role of a server?

Pretty much all of the small boxes just use the iGPU.

And that iGPU is great for a Plex server for transcoding, especially if it has QuickSync for hardware acceleration.

None of them have a dedicated GPU, just a low-powered one built into the CPU. Using a CPU without an integrated GPU would only shave a few dollars off the cost, so I don't that is a common choice.

The weird extreme range (not really Nucs in my view) have a pci slot, seemingly for a large graphics card. They’ll take an SFP card though, and that’s a excellent, though probably the most expensive mini server one could buy.

All the small Nucs just use an iGPU. Boxes like the Nuc 8 have a bit of a cult following as the iGPU is surprisingly powerful. It’s probably beaten by newer models now. The newer ones have lots of cores, and when fully loaded with memory make a handy little box for VMs.

Dunno, got some numbers to back that up?

So far I'm pretty impressed with my Rk3588 board, 8gb ram, and dual 2.5gbe.

It's a bit more than half as fast as my quad core/8 thread xeon desktop, but that's abotu where I'd expect one of the cheaper x86 NUC/Mini PC/Thin clients to land.

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